Even the youngest readers and writers in today's classrooms can benefit enormously from engagement with a wide range of traditional and nontraditional texts. This teacher-friendly handbook is packed with creative strategies for introducing K 3 students to fiction, poetry, and plays; informational texts; graphic novels; digital storytelling; Web-based and multimodal texts; hip-hop; advertisements; math problems; and many other types of texts. Prominent authorities explain the research base underlying the book's 23 complete lessons and provide practical activities and assessments for promoting decoding, fluency, comprehension, and other key literacy skills. Snapshots of diverse classrooms bring the material to life; helpful reproducibles are included.